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| Pre-Ride Yoga, 2010 Ride, Day 2 |
This weekend is the 16th Annual Oita AJET Charity Bike Ride, a big event on the Kyushu ex-pat calendar. Both foreigners of a
dozen nationalities and Japanese participants travel from all over the country
to take part (eight different prefectures are being represented this year). Riders
and volunteers fund-raise throughout the two-day, two-prefecture-long ride. In the
past the ride has supported tsunami victims in Japan and raised enough in one
ride to build a primary school in Sri Lanka through Room to Read. This year the
ride is supporting Foundation 18, a charity whose primary focus is an orphanage
(with a second soon to be built) in Indonesia. Foundation 18 is providing a
culturally appropriate upbringing for the girls in its care (rarer than you
might think) and also has a range of other activities in the broader community
including helping women escape from human trafficking and caring for elderly
people without families.
If you would like to support Foundation 18 you can donate as little or as much as you like via paypal here. If you donate after reading
this, please write Oita Charity Bike Ride in the donation comments and leave a
comment here too so we can include you in our tally ;) If you want to help out Foundation 18 and also love buttons,
check out SkullButtonry. The profits from this lovely Etsy shop all go to
Foundation 18. International shipping is reasonable (I bought a bunch myself).
So why do bloggers matter? Well, this is a very small blog
and it really doesn’t matter. However, being an occasionally lonely ex-pat some
time ago I searched for other Australian ex-pat blogs and found the wonderful 4 kids, 20 suitcases and a beagle. One day Kirsty posted about the also wonderful Edenland, so I
followed the link and started reading that blog as well. Eden blogs from time
to time about Cate Bolt, Foundation 18 and SkullButtonry. It was as a result of
all these loosely connected events that I was able to suggest Foundation 18 to
the Oita AJET committee as a charity to consider supporting with this year’s
bike ride. So in summary, a charity in Indonesia run by an Australian is being
supported by a bunch of people from all over the world cycling through Japan as
a result of a chain of blog posts beginning in Doha.
Bloggers matter.
Posts
Hundreds of major bicycle riding competitions are being sponsored by big health organizations throughout the whole world, with the chief goal of fund raising, frequently through the arrangement of pledges for participating bicyclists.
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